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There seems to be some confusion here.

First of all, rel="publisher" is a way to connect your site to your page on Google+. This can help your page be recognized as the "official" page for your brand and make it eligible for Google Direct Connect. The rel="publisher" tag goes ONLY on your homepage.  rel="publisher" will NOT get your company logo shown in the search results (at least not yet).

rel="author" is a way to link the content on your site to specific authors on Google+. This has the benefit of building up the author rank for those authors, as well as displaying author snippets in the search results. This only works with photos of people, not cartoons or logos. The author tag should go on every page where you have unique content.

This link shows you the different ways you can verify ownership:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986

Hope that helps!

It should be on every page of your blog. Here's what the code looks like:

rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your Title" href="Feedburner URL" />

Linking to external sites from a footer is not harmful, unless the sites you are linking to are low quality sites.

What can be harmful is receiving a lot of sitewide footer links with exact keyword anchor text. This can be seen as spammy by Google. Footer links & sitewide links in general also don't carry as much weight as in-context links.

Agreed. You page can sometimes end up with query parameters as well when people link to your site, and having the canonical in place will help you avoid having duplicate content.

I meant writing resources. Whoever's writing the content would do the content for the category pages as well. What I was saying is that if you don't have enough writing resources, you can also use partially templatized content.

On the sites I manage, I've done about 100-150 words per category page, with ~50 word snippets for each of the items in the category, and they've ranked well. If you really can't afford the resources for unique content, templatized content is better than nothing: "Welcome to the [blank] category where you can find products such as [blank] [blank] [blank] from merchants such as [blank]"

That's definitely true, and then there all those people who got their livelihoods destroyed by Panda & Penguin because of the shady techniques that were working for "years". It's up to each individual to make whatever choice they want, so long as they understand the risks.

Well, if you look at it from Google's perspective, their goal is to present the most relevant results for the user. If Google only returns results on a query by query basis, they have only a limited set of data (your location + the words you typed in) to figure out what would be most relevant to you. But if they look at your search history, they might be able to better determine the intent of your search.

In this case, it looks like Goolge saw that you searched for "presonus studiolive", then on your next search for "communion supplies" it returned a result for a merchant that sells both communion supplies and presonus products, thinking it might be more relevant to you.

Robots.txt should be sufficient, but if you want to completely block them, here is a useful resource:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/blocking-bots-based-on-useragent

"DayTripFinder - Things to do reviewed by you - 7,000 attractions" and "Read Reviews, Browse Opening Hours and Prices. View Photos, Maps. 7,000 UK Visitor Attractions." is what I see on my computer.

Maybe you are serving different content to different users? Or you are seeing something different because you are logged in?

Google will still personalize your results based on geography, browser history, and other factors, even if you are browsing in private mode and signed out of your Google account.

From my experiences and from the case studies I've read, schema.org generally helps with rankings. If it's a products site, then there should be no harm in using product specific semantic markup. Rich snippets such as review ratings can also increase CTR.

You're not going to fool Google into thinking a product site is a news site. If you want to compete on news, then create a separate section of the site that is news focused.

The breadcrumbs should reflect the structure of your site. It sounds like from your examples, Home - Metal gates - Driveway gates - individual driveway gate would be the way to go.

Just point them to all the business owners posting horror stories about Penguin, how their rankings have dropped and their businesses are dying, how they are now paying money to remove links that they originally paid to build, the long wait for reconsideration requests while their profits are shrinking...

It's a long term vs short term strategy. If your clients want black hat links, make sure they understand the risks, and get it in writing in case the sh*t hits the fan

Yeah, Google isn't perfect, it doesn't always detect all the spam sites. And spam can rank well for YEARS before Google catches onto it, that's what it was like before Panda & Penguin rolled out. But if it's a keyword that gets a lot of searches, Google will eventually figure it out.

One strategy that can work is to use grey hat tactics to get good rankings in Google, and then leverage that ranking position & traffic to get higher quality links.  This can help cement your rankings so that once the low value links get devalued, you still rank well because of all the quality links you acquired afterwards.

Another tactic is to build an intermediary layer between the spam links and your main site. This way, even if the sites you link to get penalized, you have a buffer site insulating your main one. You can also create multiple layers of buffers to reduce your risk of being penalized.

Anyway, these are all things I would never do with a client site, but you should give it a try if you want to learn more about greyhat/blackhat tactics

Hey, that's fine, I'm just saying that if your old site was being penalized for bad links and you just 301 redirect it to a new site, the new site will likely also get penalized. If you can clean up the link profile, great. Note that 301s do not pass all the link juice, so you will be losing a little bit of link value by redirecting. As for the new domain, like I said, it's not going to have any value just because it was originally registered back in 1999. But if you just want it to branding, that should be fine.

Does it show up as an error in Google Webmaster Tools? Also, it may have been a temporary issue that has since resolved itself.

First of all, OSE and other link crawlers provide an incomplete picture of a site's backlinks because no site has the resources that Google does. So OSE could be missing some high quality backlinks, although it's unlikely. You could try comparing data sets with other crawlers such as MajesticSEO and AHREFS.

As far as low quality links helping rankings, yes, black hat and grey hat tactics still work. Many tactics are more difficult to pull off thanks to updates like Penguin, and black hat sites tend to get burned once Google catches onto them, but they can definitely work in the short term.

I would caution against copying low quality links from a competitor, because they can burn you in the long run. Only expose your client to as much risk as they are willing to take on. You should be able to outrank them using other methods.

Here is a great list: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

There is a possibility that Google will crawl a link in comments, it's happened before with comments in Javascript. However, it will not have any impact at all from an SEO perspective.

Having keywords in a page's URL improves its relevance for that specific topic, and getting links from topically related pages is ideal. However, in order to be a really good link the content on the page itself and the rest of the site must also be related to the topic as well.Then there are factors such as page authority, domain authority, and anchor text. So the URL of the page that the link is on is not itself a powerful ranking factor.